There are three things a water company can put in your house. They are not competing products — they solve different problems, and plenty of homes here end up with two of them or all three. The trick is matching them to what your water actually contains.
A softener: for hardness
A water softener removes calcium and magnesium by ion exchange. That is the only thing it does, and where the water is hard it is the single biggest change you can make to a house.
What you notice: no more white crust around the faucet aerators, no more film on the shower door two days after you cleaned it, no more spotting on glassware out of the dishwasher. Soap and detergent start working properly, so you use less of both, and laundry comes out softer. Less obviously, the scale stops building up inside your water heater — scale is an insulator, so a scaled heater burns more energy to deliver the same hot water and wears out early.
Florida’s groundwater comes up through limestone, which is where the hardness comes from. How much of it reaches you depends entirely on what your utility did about it first.
Carbon filtration: for chlorine, chloramine, taste and smell
Softening does nothing about the disinfectant in your water, and every public supply has one because it has to. On Palm Beach County Water Utilities’ eastern system that disinfectant is chloramine, which is harder to remove than plain chlorine and does not gas off on its own.
A whole-home carbon tank handles it, and the difference is immediate — in a glass of water, in coffee, in ice, and in the smell when you run a hot shower. It also catches the sediment, rust and grit that come with older plumbing, of which there is a great deal in this county.
Reverse osmosis: for the water you actually drink
RO is a separate job again. It sits under the kitchen sink with its own faucet and pushes water through a membrane fine enough to take out dissolved solids that neither softening nor carbon is built to catch.
This is the one people notice first and the one that ends the bottled-water habit. It is worth having whatever else is in the house, and on an already-softened supply like Boca’s it is often where the money is best spent.
On a well? Start further back
Out in The Acreage and Loxahatchee, iron and hydrogen sulfide usually matter more than hardness. Both have to be oxidised out first — a softener will not touch a rotten-egg smell, and a softening resin bed fouled with iron is an expensive thing to replace. The order is: oxidise and filter the iron and sulfur, then soften, then UV for bacteria, then RO at the sink.
If anyone quotes you a softener for a smell problem, get a second opinion.
How we work out which is which
We test at your own tap and you read the result with us. Hardness tells us about the softener. The disinfectant and the taste tell us about carbon. What you drink and what you are currently buying in bottles tells us about RO. Then you get one price for the system that fits, with installation included and a lifetime warranty on the equipment.